I have been reading some pretty strange stuff this week about Gravity recently. It seems there are some pretty odd folk out there who have taken thinking about physics to a new, possibly unhealthy, level.

Basically, they are crackpots. Well I guess it’s a slippery slope – one day you wonder why the earth is sucking down on you, the next you decide to spend some time on the knotty question. Soon enough you think you’ve got it, it is clearly that the earth is absorbing space which is constantly rushing down around us dragging us with it. Or similar.

So yes, its true, Einstein did not ‘solve’ Gravity, and there is still fame and fortune to be had in thinking about gravity, so this is the example I shall use today.

The trouble with Gravity is that Einstein’s explanation is just so cool! He explained that mass warps space and that the feeling of being pulled is simply a side effect of being in warped space. It sounds so outlandish, but also so simple, that it has clearly encouraged many ‘interesting’ people to have a crack at doing a better job themselves.

So, as a service to all those wannabe physics icons, I offer today a service, in the form of a checklist – what hoops will your new scientific theory have to jump through to get my attention, and that of the so-called ivory tower elite in the scientific community?

Requirement 1: Your theory needs to be well presented

Yes, it may sound elitist to say, but your documentation/website/paper/video should have good grammar. Yes, yes, one should not use the quality of one’s english to judge the quality of one’s theory, and I know prejudice is hard to overcome, but this is not my point. My point is that in order to understand a complicated thing like a physics theory it needs to be unambiguous. It needs to be clear. It needs to use the same jargon the so called ‘elite’ community uses. Invented acronyms, especially those with your own initials in them, are out.

Requirement 2: Your proposal needs to be respectful

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Again, this is not about making you bow to your superiors in the academic world. Indeed in the case of Gravity, the physics community is one of the most humble out there. While I agree academia is up it’s arse most of the time, this is about convincing the reader that you know your stuff. In order to do that, you need to show that you know ‘their stuff’ too. If you have headings like “Einstein’s Big Mistake” it is a bit like saying to the reader ‘you are all FOOLS!’ and cackling madly. Don’t do it!

Respect also means you need to answer questions ‘properly’. That means clearly, fully, and in the common language of the community. You cannot say “its the responsibility of the community to test your theory”. This is a great way to piss people right off. It is your responsibility to make them want to. This usually means dealing with their doubts head-on, and if you can do that, I promise you they will then want to know more.

Requirement 3: You need to develop credibility

Sorry, as you can see we have yet to consider the actual merit of the theory itself. I wish it were not so, but we are humans first and scientists second. We cannot focus our thoughts on a theory if we doubt the payback. And if you say that aliens came and told you the scientific theory, then people are unlikely to keep listening, unless, perhaps they’re from Hollywood.

But seriously, credibility is the hidden currency of the world, it opens doors, bends ears and gets funds. It takes professionals decades to build and it is really rather naive to waltz into a specialism and expect everyone to drop their tools and listen to you.

That said, the science world is full of incomers, it is not a closed shop as some would you believe. If you follow requirements 1 and 2, and are persistent (and your theory actually holds water) then you are very likely to succeed.

Now this is rather remarkable. Can it really be that you can calculate the speed of light to 9 significant figures from just the earth’s gravitational acceleration and the length of a year? Intuitively I suspect you could (eventually), but then I started to think, well, what if the earth was irregularly shaped? The gravitational constant is actually not all that consistent depending on where you are either. So I checked, then I noticed he said ‘lunar year’. What? Why? What is a lunar year? Then I calculated that the time he used was 354 days, which isn’t even a lunar year. Add to that that he gives the acceleration of gravity on earth to 9-figures despite the fact that nobody knows it that well (like I said it is location dependent). Does he does the same test for other planets? No. Well what if they have no moon!

Requirement 5: The theory needs to be be consistent with well-known observations

Now if your theory has got past requirements 1-4 , well done to you, you will be welcome to join my table any time. Now is when you may need some more help.

Once a theory is consistent with itself, it now needs to agree with what we see around us. It needs to explain apples falling, moons orbiting, light bending and time dilating. This is the hardest part.

It cannot leave any out, or predict something contrary to the facts. It cannot be vague or wishy-washy. It needs the type of certainty we only get from the application of formal logic – and that old chestnut – mathematics.

No you cannot get away without it, there is no substitute for an equation. Equations derived using logic take all the emotion out of a debate. And they set you up perfectly for requirement #5.

Requirement 6: The theory needs to make testable predictions

If your theory has got past the 5 above, very nice job, I hope to meet you one day.

We are all set, we have a hypothesis and we can’t break it. It has been passed to others, some dismiss it, others are not so sure. How do you create consensus?

Simple, make an impressive prediction, and then test that.

Einsteins field equations for example, boldly provide a ‘shape’ of space (spacetime actually) for any given distribution of mass. With that shape in hand you should then be able to predict the path of light beams past stars or galaxies. These equation claimed to replace Newton’s simple inverse square law, but include the effects of time which creates strange effects (like frame dragging), which, importantly could be, and were, tested.

The beauty of these equations, derived via logical inference from how the speed of light seems invariate, and now proven many times, is that they moved physics forward. Rather than asking, ‘what is gravity’, the question is now ‘why does mass warp space’. It’s a better question because answering it will probably have implications far beyond gravity – it will inform cosmology and quantum theory too.

Conclusion

So if you are thinking of sharing with the world at last your immensely important insights, and want to be listened to, please remember my advice when you are famous and put in a good word for me in Stockholm. But please, if, when trying to explain yourself, and are finding it tough, please please consider the possibility that you are just plain wrong…

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Jarrod Hart is a practicing scientist, and wrote this to shamelessly enhance his reputation in case he ever needs to peddle you a strange theory.

It has recently been in the news that some particle may have exceeded the legal speed limit for all things : 299,792,458 metres per second.

Of course, this will probably turn out to be a bad sum somewhere or perhaps waves ganging up, but the whole hubbub has raised my hackles, and here’s why.

Because Albert Einsteinat no time said what they say he said (see here for example). They misunderstand relativity! Things can move at any speed we want, and I will try to explain the fuss now.

So let’s get to it!

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First, we have to consider the way space warps when we move.

The problems started when people realised that light always seems to have the same speed, regardless of the speed you were moving when you saw it. This seems to be a contradiction, because surely if you fly into the light ever faster, it will pass you ever faster?

Well the tests were pretty clear, this does not happen. The speed is always c.

For several years, people were unsure why – until they were told by Einstein in 1905. In the meantime, another ponderer of the problem (Lorentz) decided to write down the maths that are required to square the circle.

The so-called Lorentz equations show, unequivocally, that space and/or time need to warp in order for relative speeds of c not to be exceeded, even when two items are going very close to c in opposite directions to one another.

So something needed to give, and it was space and time!

So, newsflash! it was not Einstein that first published on space and time warping. His contribution (along with Henri Poincaré and a few others) was to explain how and why. His special theory showed that because there is no ‘preferred’ frame of reference, a speed limit on light was inevitable. The term ‘relativity’ come from this – basically he said, if everything is relative, nothing can be fixed.

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Ok, so we have some nice observations that nothing seems to go faster than the speed of light – and we have a nice maths model that allows it. So why do I persist in saying things can go faster than the speed of light?

Let me show you…

There is a critical difference between ‘going’ faster than light and being ‘seen to be going’ faster than the speed of light, and that is where I am going with this.

So lets take this apart by asking how we actually define speed.

If a particle leaves point a and then gets to point b, we can divide the distance by the time taken and get the mean speed (or velocity to be pedantic).

The issue with relativistic speeds are that the clock cannot be in both point a and point b. So we need to do some fancy footwork with the maths to use one or other of the clocks. So far so good. This method will indeed never get a result > c.

The nature of space forbids it – if the Lorentz transformations that work so well are to be taken at face value, then for something to exceed c by this method of measurement, is much the same as a number exceeding infinity.

So all is still well. Until you ask, what about if the clock is the thing that travelled from a to b?

In this case, the transformations cancel! The faster the movement, the slower time goes for the clock, and you will see its ticks slow down, thus allowing its speed to exceed c.

The clock will cover the distance and appear to have tavelled at c on your own (stationary) clock, but the travelling clock will have ticked fewer times!

If you divide the distance by the time on the travelling clock, you see a speed that perfectly matches what you would expect should no limit apply. Indeed, the energy required to create the movement matches that expected from simple Newtonian mechanics.

The key point here is that while the clock travelled, the reader of the clock did not. If you do choose to travel with the clock, you will see it tick at normal speed, and see the limit apply – but see the rest of the universe magically shrink to make it so.

Some have argued that I am not comparing apples with apples, and that by using an observer in a different frame to the clock I am invalidating the logic.

To those who say that, I have to admit this is not done lightly. I have grown more confident that this inference is valid by considering questions such as the twin paradox over and over.

The twin paradox describes how one twin who travels somewhere at high speed and then returns will age less than his (or her) stationary twin.

Now if we consider a trip to Proxima Centauri (our nearest neighbour) the transformations clearly show that if humans could bear the acceleration required (we can’t) and if we had the means to get to, say, 0.99c for most of the trip, that yes, the round-trip would take over 8 years and no laws would be broken. However the travellers themselves will experience time 7 times slower (7.089 to be precise). Thus they will have aged less than 8 years. So, once they get home and back-calculate their actual personal speed, it will exceed all the live measurements.

This has bothered me endlessly. Although taken for granted in some sci-fi books (the Enders Game saga for example) this clear ‘breakage of the c-limit’ is not discussed openly anywhere.

Still uncertain why people were ignoring this, I read a lot (fun tomes like this one) learned more maths (Riemann rules!) and also started to look at the wider implications of the assertion.

On the one hand, the implications are not dramatic, because instant interstellar communication is still clearly excluded, but that whole issue of needing a 4 years flight to get to Proxima Centauri is just wrong. If we can get closer to c we can indeed go very far into the universe, although our life stories will be strangely punctuated, just as in the Ender books.

But what about the implications for the other big festering boil on the body of theories that is physics today – quantum theory?

Well, if one is bold enough to assert that it is only measurement that is kept below c and not ‘local reality’, then one can allow for infinite speed.

In this scenario, we are saying measurement is simply mapping reality through a sort of hyperbolic lense such that infinity resembles a limit. Modelling space with hyperbolic geometry is really not as unreasonable as all that, I don’t know why we are so hung up on Euclid.

With infinite speed at our disposal, things get really interesting.

We get things like photons arriving at their destination the same tme they leave their source. Crazy of course… but is it?

Have we not heard physicists ask – how is it the photon ‘knows’ which slit is blocked in the famous double slit experiment? It knows because it was spread out in space all the way from it’s source to it’s final point of absorption.

If you hate infinities and want to stick with Lorentz, you can equally argue that, for the photon, going exactly at c, time would stand still. Either way, the photon feels like it is everywhere en route at once.

If the photon is indeed smeared out, it probably can interfere with itself. Furthermore, it is fitting that what we see is a ‘wave’ when we try to ‘measure’ this thing.

A wave pattern is the sort of thing I would expect to see when cross sectioning something spread in time and space.

Please tell me I’m wrong so I can get back to worrying about something useful. No, don’t tell me – show me – please! 😉

At some small scale, could it be, that time is simply a ‘symptom’ of a sequence of events, or states, that there is no actual time passage ‘between’ those states?

This scenario has interesting implications – it suggests life is a bit like a movie – a series of pictures on a strip of celluloid, or pages in a book, and like a book, while the story may unfold to you at whatever speed you read it, it does not matter how fast you read the story itself still has its own pace.

This doesn’t mean the book has to be pre-written, it can still unfold with utter unpredictability, the book is unfinished if you like – the important point is that we are stuck experiencing the passage of time at a rate determined internally – by the rate of chemical reactions in our brains. The drum beat of those reactions would feel the same no matter how fast or slow they seems to an outside observer. They could even be paused for a few minutes – we could not tell!

Now physicists studying energy balances of sub-atomic particles have seen that energy often seems to come in little chunks (the ‘quanta in’ quantum), and that can imply that time may also be chunky (maybe Planck time?); alas, time chunking has contradictory implications – contradictory to common sense anyway- like infinite energy flux, not to mention infinite speeds, but hey if you can just get your head around some of the workarounds physicists have dreamed up (quantum tunnelling for example) everything’s all right again. I am personally highly suspicious of workarounds, and that is what I think they are!

Anyway, even if you try to get away from quantum weirdness, you get sucked back in – take for example this geometrical example. Consider the relative positions of three point objects (small particles?) moving freely in space: they could, for an instant, line up perfectly, but if your measurement were infinitely accurate, this could only occur for an infinitely small duration so long as the particles are moving. If you try to explain this by saying space is divided up into chunks (like ‘snap to grid’ in MS Powerpoint) you get into geometrical issues that three points cannot always be integer increments apart (nor even rational increments apart) without breaking the most basic number axioms.

So even if space isn’t chunked, it turns out you can appeal to the uncertainty principle, which handily says you can only measure the position of anything infinitely accurately if you allow its momentum to be anything at all, including infinite – and infinite momentum is exactly what you (temporarily) need if you are bold enough to let time ‘leap’.

So none of these issues with time chunking turn out as solid proofs against the possibility, they just make things more slippery!

Aside: rather than a book, I like to think of our universe as being a bit like a computer program – I like to think about Pac-man when it plays itself in ‘demo mode’ – in demo mode, used to allure people at the arcade, the computer controls both the ghosts and pac-man. In the computer, a sequence of commands is run in the CPU and the speed of the computer (like the reader of the book) controls the rate at which we ‘see’ the ghost-chase on the screen, but this speed is invisible to pac-man himself – yes the ghosts chase faster across the screen, but he can run faster too.

Question: Does a time-increment universe allow time travel?

Well I don’t think we can ‘skip’ events out (we have to experience them all), but if we can go somewhere where events are more or less ‘dense’, maybe we can. We will not feel the difference, we will not get any extra life-span, our cells will age just the same – but if a friend had gone to another place is space-time, where events have bigger gaps, he may have aged at a different rate, and when you meet your friend again one of you will have time travelled forward and the other backward relative to one another.

Is this really possible? Well, yes, I think so – this model ties in very well with relativistic time travel: if you assume events are more spaced out (less dense, with bigger ‘leaps’ between them) in areas with more mass nearby. or when moving vary fast, it maps perfectly.

Conclusion

That’s it for now! Of course, maybe time does not leap, I don’t know, but its something I love to think about! Please let me know your thoughts…

Question: if you lived in flatland (a 2-d world), how could you tell if the land was curved in the third dimension?

Answer: geometry!

It turns out many of the mathematical rules we learned at school ‘fall apart’ if the working surface is curved. For example, can you draw a square on the surface of a sphere? No!

So can we use this insight to tell if our 3-d world is curved in a mysterious fourth dimension? Yes!

If we set off from earth, went in straight line for, say 1 light-year, then turned 90º, went 1 light-year, turned 90º again, and then did this yet again, you should have traced a perfect square, and be back exactly where you started. If you aren’t, something is amiss!

Now it turns out that it we do this, we will indeed discover an error; but why? And how do we know this?

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Newton told us that a massive object in motion will continue to travel in a straight line, unless acted upon by external forces. Some people think that Einstein overturned this insight, but he didn’t; indeed he extended it: he said that the force of gravity is not actually a force, and thus objects falling under gravity are actually going in straight lines! Indeed this makes sense, as anyone ‘falling’ does indeed not sense any acceleration, but rather feels ‘weightless’. Thus they are not actually accelerating, they are going straight – in curved space.

Now anyone who has thrown a ball can see this is absurd on the face of it, but Einstein was serious, and he is right, from a certain perspective. The ball is not going in a straight line through ‘regular’ space, but is going on a straight path in a 4-d construct called ‘space-time’. Likewise, he would argue that the planets are tracing straight lines around the sun; and indeed the ‘parabola’ of a baseball is actually not a parabola, but a very small part of the enormous ellipse that would be traced in the baseball could fall though the earth and go into ‘orbit’ §.

Anyway, Einstein’s model says that light travels in straight lines, but we have seen that light bends when it passes near to the sun (this can most easily be tested during an eclipse) – so… if one of the sides of your ‘perfect square’ were to pass near the sun, it would also be bent and if you followed the above rule to draw the square, you would not end up where you started.

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Physicists have grown used to Einstein’s model, and better tests for the flatness of space have been developed. For example, if you drew a circle on the surface of a sphere, the area would not equal Πr2, but would be less. Likewise, in 3-D space, we could plot a sphere and then measure the volume and if it did not equal 4/3Πr3, we would know something was amiss.

So physicists have looked at how light bends, and how the planets move, and found out, amazingly (but predicted by Einstein) that the error in this spherical volume calculation is directly proportional to the mass of matter within the sphere – proving that the warpage in space is proportional to (and thus caused by) ‘mass’. Thus mass warps space.

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But is space really warped in some ‘extra’ dimension?

Well, this is a good question. Maybe it is some extra ‘spacial type’ dimension, but you could also look at time as a fourth dimension, and argue that this space is not ‘curved’ at all, but rather that space and time simply vary in density in different locations. I personally like this way of looking at it, it eliminates the need for some vague ‘extra dimension’, and therefore swiftly removes the possibility that space could be ‘closed’ or fold back on itself in this extra spacial dimension. Occam’s razor thus prefers the ‘density’ model!

Footnotes:

§. In Wikipedia, they state that balls bounce in perfect parabolas, but note they also mention a ‘uniform’ gravitation field, and it is well to remember that the earth gravitational field is not uniform, but radial. Thus I stand by my assertion that missiles follow elliptical paths just like planets and comets. Of course, an ellipse is a close relative of both the parabola and the hyperbola, so this is not really that dramatic.

Those who say science and religion are mutually exclusive are working from the philosophical premise that there can be something outside of nature.

Those who claim that religion can be scientifically investigated, come from the philosophical premise that there is nothing outside of nature.

As neither position is superior one cannot use logic to assign greater truth.

However, the claim that there is anything beyond nature (i.e. supernatural) is the more extraordinary claim, and thus carries with it the onus to justify and explain how to reach this conclusion.

The futility of being outside of nature:

If religion is truly outside of nature it can have no measurable effect on it. If it has no measurable effect then, even if existant, it would be fair to say it couldn’t be detected by science – but then neither could it be detected by the clergy.

Thus in a non-overlapping model, the benefits of a benevolent God, such as good crops, good weather, good luck, healing or charity are impossible, as they are generally detectable.

I guess you could argue that God goes to the trouble to disguise the causes for His blessings, but why is he so afraid to show it was the result of your good faith? This argument gets a little stretched once the solutions to that are proposed. It is similar to the argument that God planted the fossils in the order of their evolutionary development to fool us into thinking that life evolved…

If you accelerate off in one direction, and keep accelerating until you are travelling fast (a relativistic speed), special relativity supposedly says the universe contracts in the direction of your travel. Fine, I can see how that makes some sense.

Now consider a massive body, such as the sun – it warps space time in its vicinity, presumably roughly equally in all directions, creating a symmetrical ‘dent’ in the fabric of space-time (if you like the trampoline analogy).

But if you fly past at a relativistic speed, and space is contracted in the direction of your travel, will the sun’s sphere of influence also be contracted, turning it from a “sphere of influence” into an ‘oblate spheroid of influence’?

Or will its shape be maintained for some beautiful reason (which is what I suspect)?

The evidence is now pretty strong that Gravity is just a symptom of ‘curved’ space time.

While it’s cool to have gravity all figured out, like so many matters in science, the answer raises even more interesting questions.

Like what is the nature of the curvature? Well, people (including me) are still trying to figure this out. In the meantime it is a good pastime to pontificate about the implications of curved space time. Here are two of my most recent theories/perspectives…

Perspective 1: Trees and apples switch places…

Each mass has a ‘destined path’, a path it will follow if left to its own devices. Just as Newton suggested in his First Law of Motion, things only change velocity when experiencing a net force.

However, he thought that gravity was a ‘force’ that made apples drop, however, the new theory of gravity suggests the apple was stationary – it was the tree and the meadow that were accelerating (upwards), a result of being pushed by the ground.

It lets us think of falling objects as ‘free from force’, and obeying Newton’s First Law.

Now, switch gears. Think what would happen if you could walk through solid things like walls. You may think it useful, but it would certainly cause some inconvenience, as you would presumable fall through the floor and plunge into the Earth’s molten core. You would fall past the centre and then start slowing; you would then briefly surface on the other side of the Earth, only to fall again. You would thus oscillate on some sort of sine wave. This is your ‘destined path’, the straight line through space time that your mass and location intend for you, where you to follow Newton #1. It is simply all the floor tiles and rocks preventing you from going straight in space-time. You are thus constantly being pushed, and thus curving off that path, thanks to the force of the floor. Lucky thing really.

Perspective 2: Slow time really is a drag…

A gravitational field can also be thought of as a gradient in the speed of time. It is possible (to me at least) that rather than supposing space-time is curved, it may well be that it simply varies in ‘density’. How? Well if time passes at different speeds in different places, that can be thought of as a density difference.

Now, we know that even when standing still, we are still plunging ahead – through space-time – in the direction of time. However, thanks to Earth’s gravity, time is going slower down at your feet, they are sluggish, stuck in the mud. Now if you have a pair of wheels on a fixed axle, what happens if your right wheel gets stuck in the mud? It slows and you turn to the right… and in the just the same way, your body is trying to ‘turn’ downwards toward your feet – the gravity you feel!

When I first thought of this model, I was smug and pleased with myself. Until I found someone else[1] had already used it to accurately model planetary orbits. Read about it here – they have shown that waves (and therefore particles) will curve for the above reason combined with Fermat’s Principle. Bastards! 😉